2021 Strategic and Political Analysis-1

m_saini · Post by **m_saini** » 09 Sep 2021 00:05

Don't know about RSS, BJP etc but an iconic company, getting a tear down from the fascist trio of RSS, BJP and GoI, won't take any damage to it's reputation.

It would instead be the biggest feather in it's cap. And what extra damage RSS, BJP etc are going to take? It's not the world will start thinking of them as "double" fascists.

hnair · Post by **hnair** » 09 Sep 2021 00:24

This usage of anti-national etc is a cliche that has lost its value since Indira Gandhi's time. Using it sparingly has its effect with BIF forces. And these are corporates. Infosys, Tata etc are self-centered and acts in self interest since it is a business. Claiming they are anti-national is hardly going to help sort the contractual obligations they messed up. None of their employees will stand up and say "Why is RSS run media calling us anti-national and what should we do?".

The Murty Classical Library is a different matter, run by a silly princeling with more money than sense. It has the potential to do actual damage and should be closely watched

chetak · Post by **chetak** » 09 Sep 2021 00:26

m_saini wrote:Don't know about RSS, BJP etc but an iconic company, getting a tear down from the fascist trio of RSS, BJP and GoI, won't take any damage to it's reputation.

It would instead be the biggest feather in it's cap. And what extra damage RSS, BJP etc are going to take? It's not the world will start thinking of them as "double" fascists.

dismantling global Hindutva has the RSS squarely in its sights.

Is it because the RSS has failed to do its job or that it has done its job so well that others are now panicked at the thought of Modi returning for a third innings.

FOE is for everyone. there are no holy cows in the market place.

Perform and be praised, don't perform and get called out.

funding sheldon pollock is antinational to my mind.

just because it is his money, doesn't mean jack to me

currently, anand mahindra is in the dock because whatever department he sponsored/funded in harvard is part of the DGH cabal.

he is rightly being called out for it. No one is saying that it is his money so let him do what he wants.

Going forward, his business may also get affected by people boycotting his products. That is the reality of the consumer and the marketplace.

It happened to titan and quite a few others

sauce, goose, gander and all that funda will come down very harshly on him too.

For Indians like me, AM is definitely far more iconic and popular than NM.

Cyrano · Post by **Cyrano** » 09 Sep 2021 01:02

Infosys works on a core principle - maximising shareholder value. In many ways one can call it enlightened self interest à la Ayn Rand. This translated to its business model PSPD - Profitable, Sustainable, Predictable & De-risked. They have realised, long before it became vogue or woke that to maximise shareholder value you need to maximise value to stakeholders - employees, clients, suppliers, partners, and the society, the last includes Govt as well. Implies scrupulus adherence to law and fair treatment of all stakeholders. Kind of oldschool, but THE company you want to put your retirement funds into.

They resist the temptation to do feel good things, fiscally very conservative. From the outside we can criticise they dont have world beating products etc. Finacle is regularly rated as a top global product. But there is little else. They tried to change it with Sikka and unfortunately didn't go well. They are mostly back to what they do best, have a mix of staffing, support, dev, engg, digital, cloud transformation projects and consulting and synergise these services to maximise revenue per client.

There is a huge growing market for what they do, so why take new, costly risks? Market cap 100B$. Communist NRN has made 1000s of employees millionnaires and millions of investors rich.

By going after Infosys with specious slander RSS has discredited itself. Thats a pity. I felt after a long time they were gaining wider recognition for the good work they do and greater acceptance from Indians who are increasingly decomplexed about Hindu identity and Hindutva. But silly acts like this won't help their cause.

Karan M · Post by **Karan M** » 09 Sep 2021 01:17

All your defense of Infosys apart they've completely mucked up two important projects, the GST and now the tax filing one. Its reflected very poorly on GOI and its they who took the blame.

It's not the RSS that has discredited itself here for merely passing the blame onto others (poor guys are trying to call it sabotage because they are unable to believe it has mucked up so bad) but the org that is being widely mocked in social media and everywhere.

As somebody who has been deeply proud of and defended Infosys, I hope they course correct and change how they are handling business. This Govt doesn't reward incompetence, and if Infosys was to be barred from all GOI contracts, it would only affect shareholders like me who've parked a lot of their funds in it, assuming a high level of integrity and competence, as well as the people directly involved with the org and not to mention Indian ITs image in the wider world.

HNair agree completely, no point in calling them anti national as versus holding them accountable for the loss to GOI exchequer and credibility. But at some level big name dudes need to be held accountable for their support to BIF too. Not an easy task.

ManSingh · Post by **ManSingh** » 09 Sep 2021 01:17

Cyrano wrote:Infosys works on a core principle - maximising shareholder value. In many ways one can call it enlightened self interest à la Ayn Rand. This translated to its business model PSPD - Profitable, Sustainable, Predictable & De-risked. They have realised, long before it became vogue or woke that to maximise shareholder value you need to maximise value to stakeholders - employees, clients, suppliers, partners, and the society, the last includes Govt as well. Implies scrupulus adherence to law and fair treatment of all stakeholders. Kind of oldschool, but THE company you want to put your retirement funds into.

They resist the temptation to do feel good things, fiscally very conservative. From the outside we can criticise they dont have world beating products etc. Finacle is regularly rated as a top global product. But there is little else. They tried to change it with Sikka and unfortunately didn't go well. They are mostly back to what they do best, have a mix of staffing, support, dev, engg, digital, cloud transformation projects and consulting and synergise these services to maximise revenue per client.

There is a huge growing market for what they do, so why take new, costly risks? Market cap 100B$. Communist NRN has made 1000s of employees millionnaires and millions of investors rich.

By going after Infosys with specious salnder RSS has decredited itself. Thats a pity.

The shiny stuff you wrote is not entirely true. Its a mixed bag of a company. Also maximizing shareholder value is the guiding principle for any publicly traded company. There is nothing special that Infy does.
For every 1000s that became rich, there would be an equal number who worked insane number of hours.

Nevertheless, projects like IT department website would have been challenging for anyone. Anyone remember the obamacare website launch.

Karan M · Post by **Karan M** » 09 Sep 2021 01:20

The previous website worked far better than the crap show that was the new site. Bar some issues with the automated excel to xml entries. It was literally changing good enough to ambitious, does nothing, and now fixing it after there was a huge hue and cry. But the issue is ppl were far more upset about the GST portal. This issue has only got attention because it affected the Mango Abdul.

chetak · Post by **chetak** » 09 Sep 2021 01:42

Karan M wrote:The previous website worked far better than the crap show that was the new site. Bar some issues with the automated excel to xml entries. It was literally changing good enough to ambitious, does nothing, and now fixing it after there was a huge hue and cry. But the issue is ppl were far more upset about the GST portal. This issue has only got attention because it affected the Mango Abdul.

always bearing in mind that infosys has handled far bigger projects in the past and done well.

Why and how did they manage three strikes ( more than three, actually) in a row, with the same customer.

For a company with the resources of infosys, is it even statistically possible to do this.

Moreover, these guys live and die by "feedback" which is actually their success mantra.

Why was the feedback not handled properly.

Cyrano · Post by **Cyrano** » 09 Sep 2021 01:48

Its a fact that the IT portal is having a bunch of problems. But neither the Govt nor Infosys are publicly trading accusations for who is responsible. Which indicates (but is no proof obviously, but going by experience) that both sides have contributed to the situation. At the same time, its also a good thing because the relationship is still OK? and they can work together to get it back on track. I'd want to believe both have the capability and good sense to make it happen.

Various factors like authentication, security features, load balancing, interfaces, infra sizing, hosting architecture etc can impact performance. But these can be fixed with required effort by any company, even Infosys. If the problem comes from incomplete/incoherent specifications or too many (policy driven) changes on the fly that are contradictory and require design rework and redev and retest we are in for a bigger and longer mess. That the project is critical for the Govts transformational agenda (which it obviously is) doesn't change the impact of these factors. Unless we have technical facts regarding the project's conduct itself, we can only speculate.

Regarding comment on insane hours - its not unique to any one company or even industry these days. You slog like a dog and you "may" get ahead, you don't and you stay where you are if you're lucky. Its not about doing anything special, its not rocket science. Its doing multiple good things consistently and a bit better then the others. Infosys has never claimed they are the best of all in all in everything. They also have their share of troubled projects, and try to deliver sooner or later (even if they lose money) and don't short-change clients or act dishonestly. Client acquisition is expensive and time consuming, retention and revenue growth for each client is the core principle. Wipro, TCS are also very similar. No one's perfect, but if your client prefers to work with you than someone else, you might be doing some, perhaps enough things right.

If you think IT services companies have insane hours, then check out product dev companies. Even better check out gaming companies (which have THE BEST developers by far IMO). You'll want to be in services any day

Kaivalya · Post by **Kaivalya** » 09 Sep 2021 01:52

^^^ Please note...panchajanya, myself and a few others asked a question of management's interest/motivation in getting something done. Specifically nm's interest in fraud foundation(thank you chetakji) , murthy library, anthem, commie posturing etc. make it harder to believe that the motivation exists?

There are open letters for a while from multiple sources which have been largely ignored. No one is infallible or no company is run on goodwill.

If we can hold politicians, babus etc accountable, why should ceos be outside of the questioning ambit? Because we idolize them? Try getting a government contract in Massa land that is a critical system for government functioning and make a few controversial public statements to understand how perception is important for public figures of the company.Or if it suits, try the same in eleven's land

prahaar · Post by **prahaar** » 09 Sep 2021 02:00

m_saini wrote:Don't know about RSS, BJP etc but an iconic company, getting a tear down from the fascist trio of RSS, BJP and GoI, won't take any damage to it's reputation.

It would instead be the biggest feather in it's cap. And what extra damage RSS, BJP etc are going to take? It's not the world will start thinking of them as "double" fascists.

Shallow criticism about the criticism regarding non performance of a service provider. Using favorite adjectives does not make criticism more credible. Calling a popularly elected government in India as fascist indicates the objectivity of the poster.

Cyrano · Post by **Cyrano** » 09 Sep 2021 02:09

Its fair to question the company's management's motivation to deliver. In fact clients question it all the time, before awarding the project, and during it. But the company's management is CEO & COO, and project team. They are accountable. NRN has no role to play in it today. He is a (big individual) shareholder, his position has marginal leverage if at all on operational matters. Even if he lands up in the offices and rolls up his sleeves - knowing him he can still do that but he has no locus standii now - things cant be fixed overnight.

I'm repeating myself - Infosys is != NRN today and vice versa.

Criticising Infosys for the project's troubles is fair. Criticising NRN's support to this or that organisation as he is a public figure is fair. Amalgamating the two serves no purpose. The achievements or failings of one can't be attributed to the other in today's situation. Doing it from a political mouthpiece is just dumb tactics, which doesn't further their cause. My last 2 cents on this.

m_saini · Post by **m_saini** » 09 Sep 2021 02:20

prahaar wrote:Shallow criticism about the criticism regarding non performance of a service provider. Using favorite adjectives does not make criticism more credible. Calling a popularly elected government in India as fascist indicates the objectivity of the poster.

dhanya ho prabhu

KLNMurthy · Post by **KLNMurthy** » 09 Sep 2021 02:40

Cyrano wrote:Infosys founders are rich beyond imagination of the common man. They use their retirement time to manage their wealth and support whatever charitable causes they want to.

That they support -some- organisations that are not on your or my side of the preferred political spectrum doesnt equate them to desh drohis.

For ex: from the links you posted, CFR board is said to be composed of :
Tarun Das of the CII; N.R. Narayanamurthy, ex-CEO, Infosys; Jamsheyd N. Godrej, managing director, Godrej; Jamshed J. Irani, director, Tata Sons; and Gautam Thapar, CEO, Avantha Group

So if tomorrow any PSU or defense equipment supplied by Godrej or Tata group fails, they must be accused of desh droh?

Philanthropic and charitable organisations are indeed a complex web of funding. We may not like that the drivel wire, Scroll etc publish. But to be "left" leaning is not a crime. If the Govt itself is not able to (and cannot) shut them down for what we see as antinational writings then why blame others?

Rajiv Malhotra has his views. Did he ever write to or meet NRN? What was his response?

NRN, Nilekani etc are billionaires who dont need ego boosts. They are at least as patriotic as any common Indian. They are excellent businessmen who see very long term, make lots of money legally, pay taxes faithfully and abide by the Law. They havent created offshore holdings in tax havens or shifted HQ to Ireland like their competitors to increase dividends. They do place a high value on ethics. They dislike controversy, dont speak unnecessarily and when they do, in measured words.

If any of you believe NRN's charity is funding the wrong or unworthy causes, make a case and write to him. Ask for a meeting and present your case. You will get a fair hearing, l'm sure of that.

But throwing mud on one of india's finest companies because you dont like their founder's supposed leanings is not a great demonstration of desh bhakti IMO.

The media outlets like scroll, wire that benefit from narayanamurthy et al’s charities should openly & prominently disclose that fact when they cover topics related to their benefactors. This is standard practice in US media. At least it reduces hysteria that there is a secret nexus between the coverage and the subject.

I don’t think this is the practice in Indian media, though I may just have not noticed their disclosure statements.

I have read the original panchajanya article. It is terrible at many levels. Complete fail even as a political attack.

No wonder the Hindu side keeps losing the propaganda war to the second-raters in the anglophone media.

KLNMurthy · Post by **KLNMurthy** » 09 Sep 2021 02:55

Cyrano wrote:Chetak ji, I didn't take it personally. No need for apologies. Infosys has always been a high profile company, and that comes with + & -s. The more visible you are the more you'll be scrutinised and criticised.

What causes me some heart burn is how quickly we move to tear down an iconic company which has been exemplary and pioneering in so many ways. That doesnt make them impervious to failures or immune from fair criticism.

This needless and mindless controversy only serves to damage a leading Indian corporate, India's IT sector, RSS, BJP, the FM, the Govt and India's reputation globally. If this is not playing into the hands of anti India forces, what is?

Did Infosys really get torn down or thrown under the bus here?

It was RSS (which disavowed the panchajanya article in damage control mode) that came out looking bad.

Narayanamurthy has dubious allegiances to put it mildly. But that doesn’t mean panchajanya had it right. It was a massive self goal, hit wicket, whatever you may call it.

Cyrano · Post by **Cyrano** » 09 Sep 2021 02:58

Exactly my point Murthy garu !

vimal · Post by **vimal** » 09 Sep 2021 03:12

Now Naseeruddin Shah TROLLED By Leftists | He Was Right AND Wrong

Kaivalya · Post by **Kaivalya** » 09 Sep 2021 04:06

Cyrano wrote:Its fair to question the company's management's motivation to deliver. In fact clients question it all the time, before awarding the project, and during it. But the company's management is CEO & COO, and project team. They are accountable. NRN has no role to play in it today. He is a (big individual) shareholder, his position has marginal leverage if at all on operational matters. Even if he lands up in the offices and rolls up his sleeves - knowing him he can still do that but he has no locus standii now - things cant be fixed overnight.

I'm repeating myself - Infosys is != NRN today and vice versa.

Criticising Infosys for the project's troubles is fair. Criticising NRN's support to this or that organisation as he is a public figure is fair. Amalgamating the two serves no purpose. The achievements or failings of one can't be attributed to the other in today's situation. Doing it from a political mouthpiece is just dumb tactics, which doesn't further their cause. My last 2 cents on this.

We agree that Infosys is not NRN. Here is what I remembered from a while back :

http://www.ingovern.com/2014/03/ingover ... on-boards/

2014 promoter representation in the board was highest compared to other companies. Even from shareholding perspective nm might not hold shares, but wife and son do making it a non trivial holding. Since then promoter voting power is still high at 12.95% but looks like lower than the 23% they held. Not sure how long

If you would like another neck to choke, someone else from INFY has to take a public stand. Otherwise who else are we going to hold responsible? Institutions?

Cyrano · Post by **Cyrano** » 09 Sep 2021 04:39

I'd rather Infosys people put their heads down and fix the darned portal than take public stands offering their necks to be choked by some agitating imbeciles.

Vayutuvan · Post by **Vayutuvan** » 09 Sep 2021 05:18

Karan M wrote:All your defense of Infosys apart they've completely mucked up two important projects, the GST and now the tax filing one. Its reflected very poorly on GOI and its they who took the blame.

Par for the course for Indian IT majors for as long as I can remember - which is a long time (think TCS being 450 employee company) and Roltas (remember that company, anyone?) and PCS were competing with TCS. All of them used to have large contracts from govt. and public sector banks as well as the few private ones. SOP was to place freshers in these projects after 3 month COBOL boot camp. After they learn some programming on the job and were about to get do some real work for the customer, they were replaced with a new batch of freshers. They would first be put into the offshore group part of an onsite project. After one year or even less, they were sent off to places all over the globe - Tasmania, Mexico, and even more exotic places.

Looks like nothing changed in all these years except salaries have gone way up yet fall short of inflation.

nachiket · Post by **nachiket** » 09 Sep 2021 05:56

^^Basically supports what many people have been saying. These companies treat the Indian Govt. as a lower class customer, reserving their better talent for the goras. Many heads would have rolled by now inside Infosys if a major repeat customer from the US had been delivered two fiascos in succession like this but this is the Indian govt. so sab kuch chalta hai. This nonsense needs to be called out and I am glad the government publicly named them as the culprit. Whether it leads to a change in behaviour, we'll have to see. The allegations of being "anti-national" are ridiculous and unfortunate though. This is just typical Indian gora worship (while treating your own people badly) which seems to afflict everyone from someone selling trinkets outside the Taj Mahal to our biggest IT firms.

morem · Post by **morem** » 09 Sep 2021 06:20

Vayutuvan wrote:
Karan M wrote:All your defense of Infosys apart they've completely mucked up two important projects, the GST and now the tax filing one. Its reflected very poorly on GOI and its they who took the blame.
Par for the course for Indian IT majors for as long as I can remember - which is a long time (think TCS being 450 employee company) and Roltas (remember that company, anyone?) and PCS were competing with TCS. All of them used to have large contracts from govt. and public sector banks as well as the few private ones. SOP was to place freshers in these projects after 3 month COBOL boot camp. After they learn some programming on the job and were about to get do some real work for the customer, they were replaced with a new batch of freshers. They would first be put into the offshore group part of an onsite project. After one year or even less, they were sent off to places all over the globe - Tasmania, Mexico, and even more exotic places.

Looks like nothing changed in all these years except salaries have gone way up yet fall short of inflation.

A 100% true. I used to work for Vegetable oil company. All our internal projects were done by ppl on bench. All good resources were for onsite work. I am not at all surprised that they mucked this up.
Contrast with TCS that runs the passport offices and is world class, admittedly not a software product though.

Vayutuvan · Post by **Vayutuvan** » 09 Sep 2021 09:51

Cyrano wrote:Infosys founders are rich beyond imagination of the common man. <snip ...>

so what, sire? NRN sir speaks French in addition angrez, Kannada, and Hindi. what does it matter to aam janata of desh?

chetak · Post by **chetak** » 09 Sep 2021 10:00

Vayutuvan wrote:
Cyrano wrote:Infosys founders are rich beyond imagination of the common man. <snip ...>
so what, sire? NRN sir speaks French in addition angrez, Kannada, and Hindi. what dies or matter to aam janata of desh?

and per his own words on runditeevee, he only ever takes a bucket bath, no showers because he saves water

Vayutuvan · Post by **Vayutuvan** » 09 Sep 2021 10:10

oh well. I had a one on one with NRN sir for 10 minutes oh 15 yrs back. His heart is in the right place. He is too old now to start any new initiative, IMHO. time catches up with everybody sooner than later.

sanjayc · Post by **sanjayc** » 09 Sep 2021 10:26

Abhijit Iyer-Mitra
@Iyervval
The only thing you need to know about the #Dismantle_DGH_conference is that organiser Audrey Truschke is a protege of Sheldon Pollock - the same guy @Infosys founder & professional social climber Narayanmurthy’s son endowed with millions. Yet we’re meant to celebrate Infosys?

tarun · Post by **tarun** » 09 Sep 2021 11:15

Cyrano wrote:
Various factors like authentication, security features, load balancing, interfaces, infra sizing, hosting architecture etc can impact performance. But these can be fixed with required effort by any company, even Infosys. If the problem comes from incomplete/incoherent specifications or too many (policy driven) changes on the fly that are contradictory and require design rework and redev and retest we are in for a bigger and longer mess. That the project is critical for the Govts transformational agenda (which it obviously is) doesn't change the impact of these factors. Unless we have technical facts regarding the project's conduct itself, we can only speculate.

Please don't speculate. Bad requirements translate into bad functional output not across the board poor performance. How does one NOT get a login not happening in 100s of seconds of wait time. Not everything needs to be done synchronously between an https request-response loop. Are they trying to run 100s of DB queries before a login happens without using any pre-populated in-memory cache ? Regarding load balancing how is it so hard to do 10x more servers and load balancers. This is a classic shardable or federation database by PAN number. The visible incompetence is jarring. The number of people who need to use income tax portal is less than 100 million in a day, certainly possible to serve with a couple of 100 VMs on even the smallest of domestic cloud platforms. Doing a basic multi-tier architecture for webscale is a well understood problem and publicly documented ( read on high scalability ).

disha · Post by **disha** » 09 Sep 2021 11:56

There is this excerpt of Infosys CEO talking about his side of the story and basically blaming the GOI for the mess.

In one of the answer, the CEO says that the GOI could have easily hired some CAs to do the UAT (user acceptability testing) and identified issues prior to the release itself.

That one point struck me odd, that Infosys basically blames its own customer for not doing thorough testing! What kind of moron is the current CEO? How much difficult it would be for infosys to hire its own team of CA or an independent team from QAI to write the test scenarios coming from the CAs to drive its own internal testing? Did it not do any internal testing?

Also the site was down for 2 days! That's criminal.

The reason why Infosys is in such a soup is that they have never invested in product development. Only product development company that comes to mind from India is Zoho. Infosys by itself is a body-shop organization. Or a glorified body shop. The best it can do is take existing processes of a company and automate it. It never has the ability to release a product and sustain it.

No Indian company incl. Infosys (Wipro, TCS etc) has developed a product. No databases. No OS. No UI library. No compiler. Nothing. Not that the talent does not exist. The skill and talent is there, but the murteas and the premjis and the sikkas never came up with a product vision. Since they had none.

Blaming the GOI Babooze is useless. GOI does run one of the most complex reservation system (the one which Indian railways uses) and yes it has its flaws but it has been developed since 1986 and operationalized since 1990s. Check out CRIS.

In this case the fault totally lies with Infosys. And of course the non-existent product development culture in basically the consulting services firms.

---

A note on Sikka. He is corrupt. Sikka diverted the infosys CSR funds to fund his wife's company and his wife was the chairperson of Infosys Foundation.

So yes, for all the good Sikka did at SAP and tried to change the infosys culture, he was also bitten by the "Arrogant bug" and made his wife a chairperson of the infosys foundation and routed CSR funds through her.

And no it is not about money. Money is secondary (or even tertiary). It is all about ego. Large Alps size egos.

PS: The article from Panchjanya may not be sophisticated, but it is definitely required. Infosys needs to do some soul searching here. If an angry article kicks them in the butts to make them better, so be it. And yes the Junior Murtea is such a Pappu that his marriage with Lakshmi Venu lasted only 4 years. On these very pages I predicted that Pappu Murty's marriage is on its last legs.

Anyway. Pappu Murty owns $300 million of infosys shares. Not bad for a lucky sperm and an excellent give from his commie father.

uddu · Post by **uddu** » 09 Sep 2021 12:10

disha wrote:The reason why Infosys is in such a soup is that they have never invested in product development.

This is not correct.
https://www.bisinfotech.com/infosys-fin ... amic-bank/

The Finacle Islamic Banking Solution is a cost-effective, customer centric banking platform and it easily creates a wide range of products and services that will be compliant with the stringent Sharia business rules and accounting rules. The solution is based on Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) and ensures transparency of accounting and profit-sharing, along with rigorous operational risk control.

Tanaji · Post by **Tanaji** » 09 Sep 2021 12:34

tarun wrote: Please don't speculate. Bad requirements translate into bad functional output not across the board poor performance. How does one NOT get a login not happening in 100s of seconds of wait time. Not everything needs to be done synchronously between an https request-response loop. Are they trying to run 100s of DB queries before a login happens without using any pre-populated in-memory cache ? Regarding load balancing how is it so hard to do 10x more servers and load balancers. This is a classic shardable or federation database by PAN number. The visible incompetence is jarring. The number of people who need to use income tax portal is less than 100 million in a day, certainly possible to serve with a couple of 100 VMs on even the smallest of domestic cloud platforms. Doing a basic multi-tier architecture for webscale is a well understood problem and publicly documented ( read on high scalability ).

Indeed… and in fact the scalability problem was demonstrably solved in an Indian environment on the IRCTC railway portal. Who did that one btw? It would be interesting if it was Infosys.

I think someone said it best: Infosys regard GoI as a second class customer, probably because of lower margins, and assign it the least of resources from a skill set perspective. And before one goes on about contractual obligations, these are on paper only and hard to enforce.

Infosys was fully aware of what it was getting into and no one held a gun to their head for bidding on this…

The real question to ask is have the financial incentives for Infosys reduced under this administration as compared to contracts before 2014? If that is the case then there are grounds for the Panchajanya article albeit due to different root cause.

Sachin · Post by **Sachin** » 09 Sep 2021 13:20

Karan M wrote:All your defense of Infosys apart they've completely mucked up two important projects, the GST and now the tax filing one. Its reflected very poorly on GOI and its they who took the blame.

chetak wrote:always bearing in mind that infosys has handled far bigger projects in the past and done well.

Vayutuvan wrote:SOP was to place freshers in these projects after 3 month COBOL boot camp. After they learn some programming on the job and were about to get do some real work for the customer, they were replaced with a new batch of freshers. T

nachiket wrote:These companies treat the Indian Govt. as a lower class customer, reserving their better talent for the goras.

Nachiket's post sums it up nicely. That is the truth. Many of the IT 'Majors' (Colonels & Brigs as well) often put inexperienced or under performing people when it comes to GoI projects. Vegetable Oil Co IIRC had once completely messed up the ESI (Employees State Insurance) 'computerisation'. In the case of Infosys it is good that GoI actually summoned their top man for a 'dressing down'. State & Central governments have also become smarter these days; many of the RFPs and contracts are now very accurate on specifications with even the penalty clauses neatly explained. Infy etc. will start behaving themselves once GoI starts penalising them. SEZ tax exemptions etc should also come with some caveats, which encourages the IT companies to put good efforts in delivering products/solutions to government agencies.

Sachin · Post by **Sachin** » 09 Sep 2021 13:40

tarun wrote: Bad requirements translate into bad functional output not across the board poor performance.

To be frank; GoI agencies have also now smartened up. The days of very vague and wishy washy RFPs are now over. Often GoI agency actually takes a consulting company on contract to study their business and then come up with an RFP. This RFPs are often very detailed. They also generally mention the acceptance criteria as well. And often it is the consulting company who would do the UAT and then give the acceptance (after concurrence of the GoI agency).

No Indian company incl. Infosys (Wipro, TCS etc) has developed a product. No databases. No OS. No UI library.

Infosys does have a product, that is Finnacle. But now looks like Finnacle is under a different company EdgeWare which was spun off Infosys. When developing Finnacle, Infosys had poached lots of managers from the bank in which they had their accounts; Canara Bank

. But you are right, Indian IT 'Majors' are basically system integrators with now some good experience in that area. But many core products like OS, database and even complex alogorithm libraries still comes from else where.

disha wrote:GOI does run one of the most complex reservation system (the one which Indian railways uses) and yes it has its flaws but it has been developed since 1986 and operationalized since 1990s. Check out CRIS.

Tanaji wrote:Indeed… and in fact the scalability problem was demonstrably solved in an Indian environment on the IRCTC railway portal. Who did that one btw? It would be interesting if it was Infosys.

IRCTC Portal is not developed by any IT 'Major', it is managed by CRIS only. The beauty of CRIS is that the first I.R Computerised Reservation System was rolled out during the 1980s, that too on main frame machines (all counters had what was called 'dump terminals'). And the system was robust, and also had the 'disaster recovery' system in place. All this was when Murtea or Premji where still thinking about starting their IT companies. The IRCTC portal was built on top of the I.R Reservation system, and their initial version was built using 'BroadVision' (a content management tool). When I visited UK in 2007, I noted that the railway companies had their own reservation system which only worked in their network and the 'any where to any where' type booking was not possible. IR's system had that feature from day one.

chetak · Post by **chetak** » 09 Sep 2021 14:01

Sachin wrote: IRCTC Portal is not developed by any IT 'Major', it is managed by CRIS only. The beauty of CRIS is that the first I.R Computerised Reservation System was rolled out during the 1980s, that too on main frame machines (all counters had what was called 'dump terminals'). And the system was robust, and also had the 'disaster recovery' system in place. All this was when Murtea or Premji where still thinking about starting their IT companies. The IRCTC portal was built on top of the I.R Reservation system, and their initial version was built using 'BroadVision' (a content management tool). When I visited UK in 2007, I noted that the railway companies had their own reservation system which only worked in their network and the 'any where to any where' type booking was not possible. IR's system had that feature from day one.

All the major credit card companies (visa, amex, mastercard, diner's club etc)have such legacy FORTRAN based systems. These systems are hugely robust, reliable and very secure and many are supported from India on a 24x7 basis

chetak · Post by **chetak** » 09 Sep 2021 14:43

are the gujarat billionaires not woke enough or is body shopping infosys more woke than others

ambani's 1500 - 2000+ jio cellular towers were destroyed, and bombs were placed outside ambani's house and adani's agri and warehousing businesses in punjab were shut down and yet no one opened their hole.

But an RSS magazine criticizes infosys, everyone is utterly disconcerted and "scared" and many eagerly spring to defend a company that repeatedly does not care enough to fulfil its contractual obligations to the people of India who are represented by the Govt of India.

neerajb · Post by **neerajb** » 09 Sep 2021 14:57

I believe you are referring to this Transaction Processing Facility. Amex, Visa, Sabre, Amadeus, 911 and lots of airlines and aggregators use it or used it in the past. It was the goto solution for extremely high volume and latency sensitive requirements like real-time reservation and financial systems. It still is the core of many financial and airline systems but it is aging and almost all the users are moving away from it. With computing getting cheaper, proliferation of AI systems in business software, preference for cloud based systems AND global trend towards data localization, TPF is falling out of favour. IBMs archaic way of monetizing it doesn't help either (annual license fee based on highest MIPS usage), plus it's difficult to get people with TPF background.

Pratyush · Post by **Pratyush** » 09 Sep 2021 14:58

The story has no legs. Yet it is still in news cycle.

The implication is clear. Frighten the Indian business by making a lot of noise. I was listening to the print in which Jaggi and Mohan Das pai were being interviewed by Jyoti Malhotra.

Listening to that the agenda had become clear to me.

sanjayc · Post by **sanjayc** » 09 Sep 2021 15:27

^^ Every segment of society is sought to be turned against Modi Govt. -- farmers are being worked upon by Tikait, businessmen are being worked upon by this "infosys attack" story, students are being worked upon by communist professors, every caste is being worked upon with different stories of oppression (eg. BJP is against Brahmins because Yogi got killed gangster Vikas Dubey who killed eight cops) .... I was watching an interview of a small-time Cong leader who said that if some 100 top people are arrested in India and put in jail (including the vile SG, RG and PV trio), all these agitations will magically disappear from the country ... saw a memo of Congress on Twitter announcing the setting up of a team for conducting sustained agitations in different parts of India

Cyrano · Post by **Cyrano** » 09 Sep 2021 17:06

The issue of user acceptance testing is always a bit contentious.
1. Functional Specs have to be of required level of detail and signed off by the client.
2. As someone pointed out, acceptance criteria must be defined and included in the contract.
3. A service provider IS expected to deliver bug free software conforming to signed off F Specs.
4. Client is expected to test adequately, in time and accept delivery of S/W if it meets the specs and acceptance criteria. This testing CANNOT substitute for service provider's obligation to deliver reasonably bug free S/W. That means a few minor/cosmetic bugs are OK and can be fixed in a patch release. But major bugs or missing functionality is NOK and will fail Acceptance Criteria.

This is in a nutshell the theory. In practice, RFP lists requirements, their level of detail, completeness and coherence never adequate. Thats why Requirements Workshops are done and detailed F Specs are written by SP and signed off by Client. - This is traditional waterfall model.

The fashion now a days is Agile with SCRUM etc. If the client team and SP team are not trained and experienced in Agile, and don't apply it sensibly, it often leads to endless cycles, tons of rework, expectations mismatch and disaster. Its great if both sides know how to do it and do it well. We don't know what methodology was followed for IT portal.

If lot of requirements change/new added during the project and have to be included within tight timelines, this complicates everything and will be a challenge even for the best project managers and teams. Saying "NO" is not a common Indian trait in such situations, and client may be unwilling to listen as well.

Clients are often unprepared and unwilling to do efficient acceptance tests with competent people since once this is done, the project responsibility shifts back to them. Many drag their feet and do inadequate testing and once the S/W goes live, all kinds of issues are discovered. Blame game starts. Escalations happen, SP gets "beaten up", penalties, legal action is threatened and SP in most cases bites the bullet and does what ever is needed/demanded (his fault or not) and the project limps home. SPs lose money when that happens and if they are performing badly they know it will come back and bite them in the a$$.

Many projects that ask for changes during the project skimp on testing, especially performance testing and UAT. And pay the price later. This not unique to any one company, and happens everywhere in the world.

I'm not defending anyone, just pointing out how things pan out in real life.

The unique thing here is the Client is the Govt of the country of the SP. If a corporate client can withhold payments, impose penalties, sue for damages etc, a Govt can do a lot more and may use other leverages in its power like making escalation meetings public like FM NS has done, or even withhold some approval elsewhere, threaten ED raid, cancel licences etc to hurt the SP beyond the contractual liability, which a corp client cannot. SPs know this and are therefore careful with Govt clients.

But if extra Govt entities associated with the ruling party jump into the fray and malign the SP, call it anti-national etc even while the Govt and SP are trying to work it out, thats going way too far. Its this last bit that could scare companies to work for Govt.

However, I don't buy that companies across the board are scared. This Govt wants to be business friendly and get the project delivered, so I believe better sense will prevail and things will get resolved.

Cyrano · Post by **Cyrano** » 09 Sep 2021 17:13

tarun wrote:
Cyrano wrote:
Various factors like authentication, security features, load balancing, interfaces, infra sizing, hosting architecture etc can impact performance. But these can be fixed with required effort by any company, even Infosys. If the problem comes from incomplete/incoherent specifications or too many (policy driven) changes on the fly that are contradictory and require design rework and redev and retest we are in for a bigger and longer mess. That the project is critical for the Govts transformational agenda (which it obviously is) doesn't change the impact of these factors. Unless we have technical facts regarding the project's conduct itself, we can only speculate.
Please don't speculate. Bad requirements translate into bad functional output not across the board poor performance. How does one NOT get a login not happening in 100s of seconds of wait time. Not everything needs to be done synchronously between an https request-response loop. Are they trying to run 100s of DB queries before a login happens without using any pre-populated in-memory cache ? Regarding load balancing how is it so hard to do 10x more servers and load balancers. This is a classic shardable or federation database by PAN number. The visible incompetence is jarring. The number of people who need to use income tax portal is less than 100 million in a day, certainly possible to serve with a couple of 100 VMs on even the smallest of domestic cloud platforms. Doing a basic multi-tier architecture for webscale is a well understood problem and publicly documented ( read on high scalability ).

Fair points, thats why the reported problems with the portal are quite baffling to me.

Sachin · Post by **Sachin** » 09 Sep 2021 17:22

Cyrano wrote:However, I don't buy that companies across the board are scared. This Govt wants to be business friendly and get the project delivered, so I believe better sense will prevail and things will get resolved.

It is Murtea's 'secular' credentials which is working here; with his tacit approval or without it. When Ambani & Adani faced similar threats, from non-government entities there was no hue and cry; because they are said to be close to the current GoI. But again people seems to be sensible as well. I remember a troll post appearing in multiple places. The main part was Murtea's grand statement that to get over from COVID recession Indian people should be now willing to work 60 hours/week. There was a comment to it which said; make people work for 60 hours and the quality of the product would be like Infy's Tax Portal

. Many people do have knowledge on Infosys and the 'sweat shop' culture dominating the IT industry in India.